The Way of the Wind | Page 9

ventured presently, toying with her broncho's mane.
"No," said Seth. "They ah mighty scarce. One about every eighteen miles or so."
Cyclona looked straight at him out of her big dark eyes framed by their heavy lashes.
"I am a neighbor of yourn," she said.
"I'm glad of that," responded Seth with ready Southern cordiality. "Wheah do you live?"
Cyclona turned and pointed to the horizon.
"About ten or twelve miles away," she explained. "There!"
"Been theah long?" asked Seth.
"Come down last week," said Cyclona, adding lightly by way of explanation, "we blew down. Father and his wife and me. Never had no mother. A cyclone blew her away. That's why they call me Cyclona."
She drew her sleeve across her eyes.
"It's mighty lonesome in these parts," she sighed, "without no neighbors. Neighbors was nearer where we came from."
"What made you move, then?" Seth queried.
"We didn't move," said Cyclona. "We was moved. Father likes it here, but I get awful lonesome without no neighbors."
The plaint struck an answering chord.
"Look heah," said Seth. "You see that little dugout 'way ovah theah? That's wheah I live. My wife's theah all by herself. She's lonesome, too. Maybe she'd laik to have you come and visit her and keep her company. Will you?"
Cyclona nodded a delighted assent, caught the mane of her broncho, and swung herself into her saddle with the ease and grace of a cowboy.
Seth was suddenly engrossed with the fear that Celia, seeing the girl come out of the Nowhere, as she had come upon him, might be frightened into the ungraciousness of unsociability.
"Wait," he cried. "I will go with you."
So he took Cyclona's rein and led her broncho over the prairie to Celia's door, the girl, laughing at the idea of being led, chattering from her saddle like any magpie.
He knocked at Celia's door and soon her face, white, Southern, aristocratic, in sharp contrast with the sunburned cheek and wild eye of Cyclona, appeared.
He waved a rough hand toward Cyclona, sitting astride her broncho, a child of the desert, untamed as a coyote, an animated bronze of the untrammelled West emphasized by the highlights of sunshine glimmering on curl and dimple, on broncho mane and hoof, and backed by the brilliancy of sky, the far away line of the horizon and the howl of the wind.
"Look!" he called to her exultantly, in the voice of the prairies, necessarily elevated in defiance of the wind, "I have brought a little girl to keep you company."
CHAPTER VI.
[Illustration]
It was in this way that Cyclona blew into their lives and came to be something of a companion to Celia, though, realizing that the girl was a distinct outgrowth of the country she so detested, she never came to care for her with that affection which she had felt for her Southern girl friends. The kindly interest which most women, settled in life, feel for the uncertain destiny of every girl child bashfully budding into womanhood was absent.
It is to be doubted if Celia possessed a kindly heart to begin with, added to which there was nothing of the self-conscious bud about Cyclona. She was ignorant of her beauty as a prairie rose. Strange as her life had been, encompassed about by cyclones, the episode of her moving as told by the gray-haired doctor at the corner grocery was stranger.
"The house was little," the doctor commenced, "or it might not have happened. There was only one room. It was built of boards and weighed next to nothing, which may have helped to account for it.
"On that particular day the house was situated in the northern part of the State."
He swapped legs.
"But the next day," he resumed. "Well, you can't tell exactly where any house will be the next day in Kansas.
"It was about noon and Cyclona's foster father was out in the cornfield, plowing. The wind, as usual, was blowing a gale. It was a mild gale, sixty miles an hour, so Jonathan did not permit it to interfere with his plowing. The rows were a little uneven because the wind blew the horse sidewise and that naturally dragged the plow out of the furrows, but as one rarely sees a straight row of corn in Kansas, Jonathan was not worried. If he took pains to sow the corn straight, in trim and systematic rows, like as not the wind would blow the seed out of the ground into his neighbor's cornfield, so what was the use?
"Like the horse and plough, Jonathan was walking crooked, bent in the direction of the wind. He seldom walks straight or talks straight for that matter, the wind has had such an effect on him.
"At any rate, leaving out the question of his reasoning which pursues a devious and zigzag course, varying according to the way the wind blows--and he is not alone in this peculiarity in